THE SUMMIT OF THE YEARS 



birds to act as a unit, without leaders or signals, and 

 perform their astonishing aerial evolutions as if the 

 flock were one bird, and not a hundred. All the truly 

 gregarious birds will do this. Does the nocking in- 

 stinct beget a sort of community of mind, so that 

 the individual members share each other's psychic 

 or mental states to an extent quite unknown to 

 us? This opens up the whole question of animal 

 communication. 



In the absence of language and reason, how do the 

 animals over a wide extent of country become pos- 

 sessed of the same knowledge and the same impulse 

 at the same time, and begin their movements si- 

 multaneously? The vast moving armies of the pas- 

 senger pigeons in the old days, the migrating crowds 

 of the lemmings in Norway, of reindeer in Siberia, 

 and of caribou in Labrador, every spring how do 

 these all act in such concert? Hunted animals sud- 

 denly become wild, even those which have had 

 no individual experience with the hunter, as if 

 the tribe were a unit, and what one knew they all 

 knew at the same time. One would like such problems 

 cleared up. I have no doubt at all that the higher 

 animals have some means of communication which 

 the race of man, since it came into the gift of lan- 

 guage and of reason, has lost, or nearly lost, and that 

 our fitful and exceptional experience of becoming 

 aware of what our friend or companion is thinking 

 about, that experience which we call telepathy, is a 

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